Wifi Antenna

Two connections to the wifi card, a white coax (Main) and a black coax (Sec).
Removing them, the white disconnected ok but the black one, the wire pulled out. Re-assembled without the black coax cable and antenna board and seems to work just fine with only the white (main) coax antenna.
Can some one explain if the other is necessary in most cases. If I need to replace this, where can I find one and what do I ask for. I seem to have a lond description of it. Thanks for any help...

 

can i ask what you were doing?

 

Strange question but if your interested, my daughter somehow got something sticky in the pcmcia slot and as you may know, the whole laptop (inspirion 1150) has to be taken apart to get to the slot to clean it out.

The white connector came out fine but the black one was a pig and when trying to ease it off the coax was pulled bit too hard and the coax was pulled out of the connector. Maybe wasn't the connection to start with, never happened before, I have taken others many apart in my time.

Getting back to the question, my wifi seems to work fine without it and was wondering what the secondary antenna did. If I have to but one, was wondering what exactly it was called and where I could pick one up.

Many thanks...

 

ok... i understand now.

From my knowledge of current laptops, (not all may be the same, but i think they are), one of the wires connects to the antenna that is horizontal (along the base of the laptop) and the other wire connects to the antenna that is vertical (along the lcd of the screen). The wireless card automatically senses which of these antennas will give it the best signal/speed. It can only use one at a time. So yours just wont have the option of switching to one or the other. It wont cause any harm, but you might get a little less of a signal sometimes depending on the wireless router and its location.